Orchid was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pattings and bouncings, as her younger sisters, but she was nineteen and not altogether a child. Doubtless she was as pure-minded and as devoted to Clean and Wholesome Novels as Dr. Pickerbaugh stated, and he stated it with frequency, but she was not unconscious of young men, even though they were married.
She planned to enact the word doleful, with a beggar asking a dole, and a corncrib full. As they skipped upstairs to dress, she hugged Martin’s arm, frisked beside him, and murmured, “Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad Daddy has you for assistant—somebody that’s young and good-looking. Oh, was that dreadful of me? But I mean: you look so athletic and everything, and the other assistant director—don’t tell Daddy I said so, but he was an old crank!”
He was conscious of brown eyes and unshadowed virginal lips. As Orchid put on her agreeably loose costume as a beggar, he was also conscious of ankles and young bosom. She smiled at him, as one who had long known him, and said loyally, “We’ll show ’em! I know you’re a dan-dy actor!”
When they bustled downstairs, as she did not take his arm, he took hers, and he pressed it slightly and felt alarmed and relinquished it with emphasis.
Since his marriage he had been so absorbed in Leora, as lover, as companion, as helper, that till this hour his most devastating adventure had been a glance at a pretty girl in a train. But the flushed young gaiety of Orchid disturbed him. He wanted to be rid of her, he hoped that he would not be altogether rid of her, and for the first time in years he was afraid of Leora’s eyes.
There were acrobatic feats later, and a considerable prominence of Orchid, who did not wear stays, who loved dancing, and who praised Martin’s feats in the game of “Follow the Leader.”
All the daughters save Orchid were sent to bed, and the rest of the fête consisted of what Pickerbaugh called “a little quiet scientific conversation by the fireside,” made up of his observations on good roads, rural sanitation, Ideals in politics, and methods of letter filing in health departments. Through this placid hour, or it may have been an hour and a half, Martin saw that Orchid was observing his hair, his jaw, his hands, and he had, and dismissed, and had again a thought about the innocent agreeableness of holding her small friendly paw.
He also saw that Leora was observing both of them, and he suffered a good deal, and had practically no benefit whatever from Pickerbaugh’s notes on the value of disinfectants. When Pickerbaugh predicted for Nautilus, in fifteen years, a health department thrice as large, with many full-time clinic and school physicians and possibly Martin as director (Pickerbaugh himself having gone off to mysterious and interesting activities in a Larger Field), Martin merely croaked, “Yes, that’d be—be fine,” while to himself he was explaining, “Damn that girl, I wish she wouldn’t shake herself at me.”
At half-past eight he had pictured his escape as life’s highest ecstasy; at twelve he took leave with nervous hesitation.
They walked to the hotel. Free from the sight of Orchid, brisk in the coolness, he forgot the chit and pawed again the problem of his work in Nautilus.